From a crowded pool party at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri to a street party in Daytona Beach, Florida, Memorial Day festivities brought hundreds close together in several U.S. cities Monday ⁠— largely without masks or other such precautions.

But while behaviors related to the pandemic have changed in recent days, the director of the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital said the coronavirus itself is still very much the same.

“The virus is what it was previously: highly infectious and transmissible from one person to others over short distance,” Dr. Mark Poznansky told Jim Braude on WGBH News’ Greater Boston Tuesday.

More companies are looking to produce a vaccine to stop the spread of COVID-19. Dr. Mark Poznansky, Director of Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to break down HaloVax’s coronavirus vaccine.

Mark Poznansky MD, PhD, A Steve and Deborah Gorlin MGH Research Scholar, explains his approach to developing a vaccine for COVID-19

“The current COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how quickly an emerging infectious disease (EID) can spread across the globe, threaten individual heath and wreak havoc on the economy and our way of lives.

Almost a decade before the current COVID-19 outbreak, Mass General investigator and Infectious Diseases Physician, Mark Poznansky, MD, PhD, received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a platform for accelerated vaccine development in the event of a rapidly spreading EID.

Michael V. Callahan, MD is the Director, Clinical Translation & Mass-Casualty Therapeutics at VIC , an Infectious Disease Doctor at MGH and a special advisor to the US assistant secretary for preparedness and response.

This Wired piece The Dire Diplomacy of the Global ‘Race for a Vaccine’ by Brendan Borrell includes quotes from Dr. Callahan

Following a press release on the article by FASEB Mark has been interviewed by a number of publications including Newsweek, The US News and the Daily Mail.

“There is no high-quality data showing that taking the anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can help COVID-19 patients, the authors of a review of existing evidence have warned. As such, they said the drugs should only be used to treat patients taking part in carefully designed clinical trials.”